Roundup: Nine Solid State Drives from Corsair. Page 3

We continue series of articles talking about SSD drives. And today we would like to discuss products from Corsair. We managed to get our hands on a total of nine models from almost all existing product families including a new SSD on SandForce controller.

Corsair Reactor Series: R120 CSSD-R120GB2, 120 GB

Finally, here is another new series from Corsair targeted at the low-end market segment. The Reactor series is based on the JMicron JMF612 controller we saw, in a modified version, in SSDs from Western Digital. Now we’ll have a look at this controller from a different side, especially as it is indeed different: Corsair’s series includes other storage capacities (60 and 120 gigabytes) and each model is equipped with 128 rather than 64 megabytes of cache. We are promised a read speed up to 250 MBps and a write speed up to 170 MBps (110 MBps for the 60GB model). The Reactor series supports TRIM. Unlike Western Digital, Corsair has implemented the controller’s support for USB 2.0 (alas, not USB 3.0): you can see the USB connector next to the pair of SATA ones.

Our model has firmware version 1.0.

Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used:

IOMeter version 2003.02.15

FC-Test version 1.0

PCMark Vantage

Windows 7 Disk Defragmenter

WinRar 3.91

Testbed configuration:

ASUSTeK P5WDG2 WS Pro mainboard

Intel Pentium 4 620 processor

IBM DTLA-307015 system disk (15 GB)

Radeon X600 graphics card

1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

The SSDs were tested with the generic OS drivers and formatted in NTFS (wherever formatting was required) as one partition with the default cluster size. 32-gigabyte NTFS partitions with the default cluster size were created for FC-Test (if the drive is smaller than 64 gigabytes, it is partitioned in two halves). Each SSD was connected to a mainboard port and worked with enabled AHCI. We want to remind you that we are now using new methodology for testing storage devices.